Tuesday, November 11, 2008

How To Homeschool: Your Mission Statement Part 4

The first step in knowing how to homeschool is to ask yourselves as parents "why homeschool?"

List as many reasons as you can about why you want to homeschool. If, as in our case, you have wanted to homeschool for some time but your reasons have evolved over time, make sure to record even your earliest reasons for homeschooling.

When my husband and I first started thinking of homeschooling, our son was just an infant. We came to the idea initially as a result of being exposed to the attachment parenting movement. We naturally practiced attachment parenting and it made sense to us at the time to expand our committment to attachment parenting beyond the preschool years.

I then became a born-again Christian and my husband renewed his commitment to live as a follower of Jesus Christ and we realized that homeschooling would give us a reliable way to pass on our Christian values to our children.

As we began researching education and the history of education in America, the reasons for us to homeschool just began to pile up. We wrote down as many of these as we could remember when we sat down to determine our mission statement.

So the first step is pray and then make your list. Do not worry about prioritizing yet, we will get to that next time.